Transforming Crisis Intervention with Grant Riewe

This is Customer Obsessed, the show that dives into the nitty gritty challenges of entrepreneurship and genuine customer connection. In this episode, we are speaking with Grant Revy, the CTO of Vibrate Emotional Health. In our conversation, we dive into how technology is shaping mental health support, discuss the game-changing 98 crisis lifeline, and explore why real human connection matters now, more than ever. Ready to get Customer Obsessed? Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Customer Obsessed. Eric, how's it going? It's been a little while. I feel like you've got some big news about a new role that you might have. Yeah, I took a new role at Coastal Cloud about a month and a half ago as the CEO. So I'm excited about that. I've been on the board for over three years and really, really exciting company in the Salesforce space doing some incredible purpose-driven work. We're actually going to hear from one of our customers today, which is pretty cool. I don't know that I've yet interviewed a customer of mine on Customer Obsessed. We'd have to dig through the archives to validate that. I think that that's accurate. This is the first time that we've had an actual customer of yours on the show, which is very cool. We were at Dream Force together last month in September for you Salesforce junkies out there, another amazing event in San Francisco. I'm a little biased because I grew up out there, but I will say that the city showed very, very well and it was great to see San Francisco coming back into action. Yeah, onward, October, we're here. It's almost over actually. Halloween's coming up. Here's a bit trick-or-treating, right? I know. Yeah. Last week, I've been to six different states. California, New York, Kentucky, Illinois, Colorado. Maybe it was five. I was really hoping actually that you were going to tell me you'd been to six different Halloween parties. I thought that that's what it was leading into. It's possible. Do you and Melissa ever dress up for Halloween? Last time I dressed up for Halloween, I dressed up as Sarah Palin. So that was a wild girl. It was quite the hit, though. I bet you commit with the wig and everything. I had the whole deal, the whole deal. Oh my God. I probably dressed up since then, but that was my most popular Halloween costume. I love it. All right. Well, our guest today is Grant Revy. He is the CTO of vibrant emotional health, and they do all of the administration for the 988 Crisis Lifeline, which is incredible life-saving work. And so that's one of the reasons that I was so excited to have him on. And I'm sure you as well. Yeah, I can't wait. He's going to be awesome. He was incredible to hang out with a dream force. He's been a customer of ours here at Coastal for a while now. And like I said, to the outset, one of the things I love about my new role is that this company really tends to gravitate towards purpose-driven work. And I think you'll hear from this guest today that that's absolutely something that is happening here. And this really isn't a technology discussion as much as it's a discussion around. A couple different angles, but one angle is really the mission-critical nature of this and how do you set up a contact center and multiple channels for customers that need immediate access to information, whether that's health or whether that's something they want to buy or whether it's trying to get them into the right channel in your company. One of the cool things about what Bibern's done here is just the immediacy of how they engage with the folks that are what they call help seekers. And we'll learn about that shortly here. So Grant, Revy, welcome to Customer Obsessed. It's great to have you here today. Thank you much. Thank you for coming to me here from vibrant emotional health. So tell me about vibrant. I think for our listeners, might be an organization they're not familiar with. Give us kind of a backstory and what really the mission of the organization is. So vibrant emotional health is the name of my organization, formerly known as the Mental Health Association of New York City, MHA, is a loose association of organizations focused on mental health and behavioral health and emotional wellness across the country. Vibrant has existed for over 50 years at this point as a nonprofit and has grown over that time and we rebranded to vibrant a number of years ago. We are most known for our work around suicide awareness and prevention, but we do a lot of work in the community, adult family services, teen services, other work in the New York area as well as our national advocacy around suicide awareness and prevention. And then you're tied into the 988 hotline, correct? Yes, yes we are. And what does that mean exactly? What is your relationship there? So vibrant is the 988 administrator. We have a cooperative agreement with SAMHSA, which is the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. They are an agency underneath Health and Human Services. SAMHSA is our partner in 988, which is formerly the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. We are the administrator, which means that we're responsible for the operation of the network. We make sure all the calls go where they need to go, routed to states, same with texts, we enable all of the centers that participate in the network. We collect all the data around how the network is performing. We conduct audits and quality oversight on all of those interactions. And then we also maintain the backup network as well as specialized services. Vibrant was also the administrator for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which is the precursor to 988. How long has 988 been around? 988 formerly launched in July 2022, but the NSPL launched in 2005. So really, it's been around for almost 20 years. And is the difference now that 988 is truly like a national program or what is the evolution bit? The evolution is one of kind of how easy is it to remember. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-8255, is still active, but that actually marks the beginning of the relationship of SAMHSA and Vibrant to launch a national service around suicide, intervention, and engagement. So 988 is the recognition that we need an easier to remember number so that more people can access the services here. I'll note that 988 isn't just for suicide intervention or people who are having suicidal ideation. It's also for people who are experiencing forms of crisis that lead towards suicide, which may be domestic abuse or financial distress or housing distress. And it's not just for help seekers who are personally experiencing some form of distress, but it's also for family, friends, loved ones who may wish to help an individual that they know or may wish to understand how they can get help in the community for themselves as they are near someone who is in distress. So this is pretty important work. Your customers are in crisis. Your customers are suffering. And you are like the first touch point to hopefully get them on a path out of that situation, right? Yes. You'll hear me use a term help-seeker instead of customer where acknowledging where those individuals are, but they are customers where they're in a customer service business. The people who call us or text us or web chat with us or video phone with us are frequently at the worst moment of their lives. And so we must handle them with the utmost care and consideration for the experience that they're having and do our best to get them to a point of stability in that moment and then get them engaged with the systems of care in their community that allow them to stabilize and get back to a healthy place. And so the people that are taking these calls have to be very skilled at what they do and they have to very quickly come up with solutions that can hopefully get this person into a better spot and then into some network of care, right? That's correct. The 98 network has over 8,000 individuals who are taking the interactions from people in need. These are trained crisis counselors. So that's actually a specific certification designation. Some of these individuals are therapists in mental health space. Some of these are individuals who just have a passion for helping others, but they predominantly have this crisis therapy, crisis intervention formal certification. We do have volunteers in the network as well. Some of our partners that provide national backup services work with volunteers. All of those volunteers also go through training. Everyone who takes interactions is really, really committed to helping that person that's on the other end of the line find their way back. For those who aren't as familiar with mental health crises have never experienced it themselves or have never been close to someone who has gone through something like that. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of the technology here in offers? that critical at the moment support, right? Because of how and when people are reaching out to the crisis line. The majority of my role as Chief Technology Officer for Vibrant in the role that I play with respect to 98 and what we do is really about accessibility of the lifeline and access to services. So it's extremely meaningful that we've moved from the 100 number to 98 because it's a whole lot easier to type 98 than it is 100, 273, 285. Accessibility is that first step. The consideration that I have is making sure that when someone calls 98, that it can go where it needs to go. Like 911, it has to be a service as accessible 100% of the time. 98 is structurally a little bit different from 911. 911 is a regionally based service. It is anchored in communities and that's because of the growth of 911 over time. 98 is a nationally centralized service. The help providers are all in the communities, but the clearinghouse is national. You dial 98, it comes through Vibrant and we make sure that it gets into the state in the community where you're residing. And I have to make all of those mechanics work repeatedly. It's not just for calls. It's also for texts. It's also for web chats. It's also for video calls. So all of those things have to be available and sustainable all the time. The problem is in making all of that work or myriad, but it is the focus of what we do. We have very little downtime. We have an extremely high average speed to answer. And our handle time, from our perspective, is immaterial because we want the help secret and the council to remain on the call as long as they need to remain on the call. We can talk about all those sorts of different technologies that are involved in making all of that work. But my oversight body, SAMHSA, my regulatory partner is the FCC. And I work with the FCC every day on ensuring that we have carrier coverage for the 50 states, for the six US territories. And then I also operate in partnership with the VA and the Veterans Crisis Line, because we're also accountable for linking calls for veterans and other military personnel at all Oconus sites, which is an acronym for Outside of Continental United States. So effectively, military installations all over the world to still route all of those calls in. So I really have a global presence for what is a national service. I'll just go on and say it. There's a strong argument to be made that this is the most mission-critical contact center in our country. Yes, I would say there are 227 of us who are providing the service here, but you're right, Eric. This thing has to work. It needs to be there in your moment of need. For help seekers who are experiencing crisis, we have a very narrow window. They have to opt in to reach out to us. And we have to be there in that moment so that they don't take a step that is not necessary, so that they don't take a step towards self-harm. So mission-critical is a great way to call it. Well, and you think about it. We all call into contact centers as part of our daily lives. We all use text now as a way to interact with brands and try to get help whether we're calling a bank or we're calling a brand. And most of them still get it wrong. How many times do you get to someone that says, well, I can't help you with that. I've got to transfer you to someone else. And now you're waiting for 10 minutes for the next person to get on. And that person gets on and asks you all the questions again that you've already answered the first time. And your frustration level goes through the roof. So I'm just telling that story because what you are pulling off here is incredibly hard to do. And it's done for obviously a real purposeful reason. But your organization deserves a lot of kudos for pulling it off. It's not easy. You can't drop a call. We can't. I mean, we're not the only organization or network in this scenario. You know, 911, of course, is in the similar scenario. The poison control hotline is in this scenario. There's a maternal distress hotline launched recently. There are other services that are like this, where it's critical. One of the things that we have in 988 is unique to customer service and how we think about bringing that customer in that help secret in. And many applications we would think about having an IVR for a customer to select their option in. And that makes sense right in a retail scenario. We want that customer to kind of help navigate what it is their issue is. From my perspective, 988, and I do have an IVR, I'll note that. But I have to allow my help seekers to come in and get to a human as quick as possible, which is a typical most of our customer service scenarios. I would love to gather information about that help seekers they are coming in. But they're at a critical moment. And I cannot impede their progress to getting to care. And so I do think about the interaction mode of all of our help seekers a bit differently. And it's one of the reasons I said I don't care about handle time. I don't. I would just be to answer a really care about the leanness of the IVR I care about. How someone comes into a chat or text channel and how I might engage with them to do a pre-interaction survey. I really care about the fact that they can bypass that and get straight down. - No, the average handle time, you want that to be long, right? - Our average handle time is north of 20 minutes, which might terrify another customer service organization. But for me, if that's quality time spent between someone in need and our crisis counselor helping them navigate their individual situation. - You know, it's interesting you talk about or you tell us a story about the creation of 988 and how it was just about, it's an easier number to remember. How dramatic was the uptick in intake once that was launched as the go to number? - It was pretty dramatic overnight. So we launched on July 16th, 2022. That's when we did the conversion from the 100 number over to 98. That weekend was high because there was a whole lot of attention, a whole lot of media around that. Once we got through that media bump, volume was still up about 40%, 45%. And that's been persistent over the last years. The first year of 988, we took about 5.1 million interactions that's inclusive of calls to the veterans crisis line. In the year prior, we did about 3.2 million. So that's a significant increase over the year before and that's primarily related to the ease of remembering 988 over the 800 number and that all of the media attention that we got as we were transitioning the service. - Tell me what Salesforce's role is in your enterprise and your own protection and kind of what your expectations and your vision is for your partnership with Salesforce. - Yeah, so one of the exciting things that we are doing under 988 is we are bringing technology to the network of crisis centers that support 988 in partnership with SAMHSA. So we are building what we're calling the 988 Unified Platform. And what this is is a piece of technology for crisis centers to be able to take interactions with help seekers. Most of the organizations that make up the network are nonprofit community organizations. And so most of them do not have access to funds to invest in their own technology. Some are on Salesforce already or ICarol is a large piece of technology that people use. Some centers are on pen and paper still for how they take interactions. And so what we have done jointly with SAMHSA is fund this 988 Unified Platform. And Salesforce is the front end of that for crisis counselors to interact with help seekers. This gives us a best in class interface for crisis counselors to ask the right questions, capture the right information, find the right resources to help that person in the moment. So for us, this represents kind of an evolution here maybe a sea change for technology use in the 988 network. - Yeah, I mean, it's kind of fascinating to think about it. Like just a simple change like that drives incredible volume. Obviously you're doing mission critical work. We have a lot of customers out there that are just trying to get more customers to call and brand is important. And it feels like you did an incredible job or 988 did an incredible job getting a word out, right? 'Cause it's fixed with you too. It's a very memorable number. - Yeah, there's much more work to do. The numbers are kind of upsetting when you hear them. So I'll share this with you here. About 22% of Americans experience some form of mental illness in 2021. There are around 330 million Americans right now. So if you do the quick math, that's about 65, 66 million people who experience some form of mental illness within the year. Remember that I said we took about five million interactions in that first year. That means that we have a lot of understanding. met need less than 10% right? Less than 10% now what I do want to note is that 988 isn't the only opportunity for people to get help. There are lots of states who have statewide mental health hotlines. I would do the Colorado in particular is very effective state hotline it currently takes about five times the volume of 988 in the state of Colorado and there are many other states Michigan California in particular investing in access to mental health the hotlines or warm lines so there is a lot of effort here to meet the need but even if we add all of those things up there are a lot of people who are not accessing this kind of crisis mental health care and so we have much more work to do that is one of the things that we are looking at in the years ahead of how do we create further awareness? So this is like the first step obviously in a moment of crisis and 988 is there to like start that journey. Talk me through like what a positive outcome looks like longer term for a help seeker once you get them into the system for lack of a better word. It is dependent on the individual kind of where they are at. The positive outcome here immediately is that the person's life continues right and they are able to live happy and healthy. There are many paths there depending on the crisis that that individual is experiencing. What we are attempting to do in the generic is help that individual that calls us deescalate understand what it is that they need to have in terms of stability and then hand them off to those support structures within their community. Sometimes that means referring an individual to a community group just so that they can have people to talk to. We see this frequently with middle aged men who call who don't have similar support structures here to actually share a talk about their emotions and the challenges here and so that might just be connecting them with a talk group or a book club at the VFW something to get them engaged in the community. It can be as simple as that. Some people who are experiencing a more significant form of mental illness may need some sort of impatient care. Here we connect to local systems or state systems around bed registry. Some people need analytic care, talk therapy, types of things. All of those assets are available. From my perspective at 98 I am the front door. Where I need to work with is that deescalation and then I am in partnership with all of the states and the SAMHSA and all of these communities in which we operate to ensure that my crisis counselors know what the next step could be based on the evaluation of the individual and are able to provide that information. It seems like the mission of your technology is to get people in touch with human beings and to get them into the hands and the discussions and engagement with other humans that can empathize. Yeah, absolutely. It's really a human centered mission here, right? My customer obsession, if you will, is the human element. My crisis centers and contact centers are all oriented on how quickly can I get you in touch with a person that will listen to you. So we're living in this era of AI, or I should probably say we're at the beginning of the era of AI. I definitely think it gets over hyped and it'll take some time. We're living in this era, we're living in this era of chatbots and machines. How is that going to impact or help or will it a world where you are really trying to establish human connection whenever possible as quickly as possible? Well, I have to say that I'm going to be a late adopter here. There is a feature, but it is a far feature is what I'm going to say. My particularly concern here as I have launched the development of conversational AI or generative AI is how well it means the unique needs of the individual that I am working with in that moment. So from a help-seeker perspective, I do not see a near-term feature where I could put an AI solution in front of a help-seeker. Part of that is the people that call us when they're in emotional distress do regress to their earliest communication modalities, but they don't necessarily have the full cognitive abilities that you and I are using right now in this conversation. And that makes it difficult for these AI-enabled systems to interact with the person. It also means that that individual may hear a question but not be able to understand it because of the state that they're in. And then you need to adapt your language. Humans do this very well as one of our core abilities is we've developed a language over the last period of human history. So I need conversational AI and generative AI to rise to the level of human capability to switch your expression, understand cultural nuance, understand identity nuance here for me to bring it forward. So that really means I can't use it with help-seekers or counselors. Now I can still think about AI for other applications. One of those that I would think about is how can I look at the ways in which I might need to staff up crisis counselors. My demand isn't driven by a product release. The immediacy of demand is not driven by marketing. My demand is primarily driven by public events, so public deaths or attempts to complete suicide. And those events that make the news media do trigger interaction volume to me. So I'm looking at AI applications of topic modeling and looking at what is happening in public forum discussions where I might hear something that says, "Oh, people are talking about this more today this afternoon than they were yesterday. I'm going to get increased call volume. I need to think about staffing up this evening because there is more awareness in this moment." The second piece here is ways to provide that counselor better information about the support services that are in the community or the help-seeker is. So that's where I'm looking at AI applications, really from a demand forecasting standpoint, logistical applications in the near term. Let's switch gears for a second, a little bit of a public service announcement for us. Tell us how Coastal has been a part of your team and partnership and how that's worked out. Yeah, the Coastal Cloud team here has been part of our work since before the launch of '98. So our relationship goes back quite a bit. The team that we have working with us, actually we have several teams working with us. The big effort is around that '98 Unified Platform' that we're building to enable crisis centers all over the country to take more calls and emblem of higher quality and greater efficiency. The Coastal team is working on that sales force front end to really enable counselors. There's a lot of great interactions in terms of understanding the needs of crisis centers who have been on the Unified Platform where now release five is right around the corner here. So we're five releases into this major product here. The Coastal team has been instrumental in getting us to the point where we're at here with close to 50 centers on the Unified Platform out of the 227 in the network today. The Coastal team is also helping us with our own internal contact center, which is both part of the network and provides other services. So this is here to help, which is the crisis center within vibrant. We are part of the '98 network. We are also servings in New York and the city of New York as well as a variety of other entities. And so Coastal is helping us build our own crisis contact center platform modeled on the state, Unified Platform, and currently doing a major migration to help our internal team that's supporting New York City and New York State around '98 right now. Thank you for saying that, Grant. We absolutely cherish the partnership. And hopefully we're doing everything we can to help you on your mission as we continue to try to provide help for these help seekers. Let me ask you another question that's maybe the bigger question. Mental health and mental health crises are, I think they're getting more attention in our society. I think there's less of a stigma attached to people that have challenges with mental health. And as you said, the numbers are high. They're in the 20s or 30 percent depending on how you measure it. What work do we have to do as a society to stem the tide and maybe imagine a world where mental health is not such a large challenge in our society? What are some of your bigger ideas? I'm at first note that I'm not a practitioner here. I'm a technologist and of course I'm a passionate advocate here, but I have to say I'm not a clinician. But here's what I would say. Community and conduction. One of the challenges that we face right now that people are not connected to other people in some of the ways that they used to be. And I'm not thinking about loose connections. I'm thinking about deep connections. We're actually able to share your whole self, share your inner challenges, your inner triumphs, and really connect with people. I don't want to just point to social media as a particular challenge here. It's certainly symptomatic here and is probably a contributor, but it's not the only thing. Certainly we became isolated in the pandemic, this physical isolation in the pandemic. I live alone here, as just me and the dog. So you can bet that I talked a lot to my dog in those days of lockdown. He doesn't talk back. But it's not the same kind of response here. But loneliness, loneliness is a huge thing. And even when you're living with other people, most people experience loneliness. I talked about the prevalence of distress in men, particularly middle aged men, like myself. On average, one to two close friends. And depending on your community and culture, you may not express yourself to those close friends in terms of your challenges, your elements of distress, your trauma. That's not great in terms of your ability to be connected. There's pseudo-connectiveness here, but you really need to have a conversation, people. And so I say community, I say connectedness. We have to find ways to spend time with other people. We don't have to be talking about emotions. That's not the point, but we do have to feel connected. So how do we build those connections? How do we rebuild those support networks? That's really what I'm thinking about in terms of deferring some of the distress and discomfort and crisis that people are experiencing right now. Well, look, I think you can take that into less crisis-oriented situations and just think that organizations work together better, families work together better if there's moments of connection and collaboration and human connection, in which you cannot get on social media. I agree, I'm not an anti-social media guy, but there are empty calories there if you think that's where you're getting your connection. There's a lot of entertainment and there's a lot of information that we got on a social media, which is super cool, and the media is incredible, but there are empty calories of what you're actually looking for is true human connection. Empty calories is a great way to phrase it. You get the form of connection, but you don't get the substance. Right. Yeah, I think you kind of nailed it. Of course, Grant, as we wrap up today, one of the things that we always love to end on is focusing on the power of literature. When we talk about connection too, I have always found that, yes, I want to connect with actual real-life people, absolutely, but I've also found very, very deep connections also with fictional characters or people who are sharing their stories through their own books. So I'd love to hear from you. What is your customer obsessed pick? What is a book that you or player poem that you've connected with really deeply that's made an impact on your life? I am a voracious reader. I consumed somewhere between 75 and 100 books a year, and I couldn't tell you a favorite, but I could only tell you several. So let me give you a couple of responses. The first is "Dune" by Frank Herbert. I love science fiction. I love Frank Herbert. I think "Dune" is probably his best work. You can enjoy it for the science fiction. You can enjoy it for the relationships. You can enjoy it for the future prediction. And you can flip it around and enjoy it as an allegorical tale for protecting the environment, which is really what it's about. As Frank Herbert was looking at the coastline, and damaged to the coastline, on the west coast, where he was growing up. The characters there, the story there, kind of the depth here in the ways that you can reread it. That's kind of my first response. My second response is going to be both the "Havet and the Lord of the Rings" by Tolkien. The thing that interests me about that, besides the story itself, besides the fact that Tolkien really launched the concept of fantasy, was the context in which it was written. The "Havet" was written as a series of letters to his son who was serving in the RAF in North Africa. And to think about why Tolkien was writing to his son in that context, and what he was expressing to give his son some sort of a reprieve from the environment he was in as amazing. And then with Tolkien himself, Chuck, which is a larger life work here and turned into the "Lord of the Rings," and then the level of depth behind that. It's just the effort and involved in what we would now call "World Building," but didn't have a term in Tolkien did it as amazing. So I just like plumbing that universe. And then the last that I would leave you with is the Iliad. Eh, right? Over, right? Greek classic here, Homer, yes. And I encountered that. I think I first read the Iliad somewhere around 95, 96. And to read that as the tale that it is. And then to read it as history, and then to read it as a description of that region of the world and the Mediterranean. And then understand the references. They talk about the seven cities as well, archaeological expeditions have shown that there are many cities built on that site of Troy, and kind of seeing how the story highlights the transition of a verbal history into a written history. I'm just eminently fascinated by those things. So I apologize for giving you more than one answer, but I cannot choose one book. I would choose them all, if I could. I am exactly the same way. If someone asks me my favorite book, I have to specify. I'm like, OK, what genre are we talking about? What time period? I have to get very, very specific. And then even within those broken down categories, I have five or six recommendations. So I love that you provided more. And I have read and engaged with all of those very, very deeply in my own life and couldn't agree more in terms of their depth and beauty and impact. Grant, what did you study as an undergrad? Oh gosh, I really had three areas of study. So I'm formally a math major. I claim a computer science major. And I say it that way because my course work was used as the representational course work to the State Board of Education to certify my college to offer a computer science major. So in the year after me, they awarded a computer science major, but it's my course work that made it happen. And then I did not complete it, but I was very nearly a music performance major as well. I played music professionally for a number of years, saxophone as my primary instrumental, but I play it doesn't. I actually started my career in music, not technology, which is a whole separate story. Well, with very strong faces that bring art into technology and bringing the liberal arts into technology projects and into teams and being gracious readers and understanding the human condition and narrative is actually the glow that puts these things together and creates incredible outcomes. There's a very strong theory there. It's a good theory. Because we're nothing without art, right? I believe that. And I'm not an artist either. I do love to read and write. Well, if you write, you're an artist. I guess. You're expressing yourself here, Eric. You are an artist. Art is not limited to merely performative scenarios. Grant, thank you so much for being on customer obsessed. We really enjoyed the conversation. And again, thank you for the partnership here from Coastal. And I look forward to doing a lot more. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate the time today. Wow, that was a good one. It was. I think it was a real pleasure to talk to Grant about his work and everything that they're doing. The work they do at vibrant takes perfectly orchestrated technology. And it takes an extreme amount of empathy and knowledgeable content to save someone's life when they call into his organization. That's like the perfect collision of technology and the human spirit. That's what I love about this story. Yeah, I agree to be there for people in their most vulnerable moment. And to bring them back to a point of safety, where they can then take other steps forward is such a weight and responsibility to carry. Yeah. For me, personally, I have had people close to me come and tell me that they've had suicidal thoughts. And it's scary. It's scary for them. They're being completely open and vulnerable. and sharing that they need help. And so to be on the other side, offering them the help and support that they need is incredible. And I'm so, so grateful to everybody who does that work, because I know how critical it is. - Yeah, I mean, it's not uncommon either, right? I also thought it was really fascinating about, you know, and marketers out there think about this. You know, the change they made with the number was critical. Like they went, seven digit number that no one could remember. So how many people out there didn't have access to this incredible service. And someone said, you know what, we need to actually make this really easy to remember. We need to imprint it on people's brains. And boom, the call volume goes up. So obviously this is in a situation where it's a critical service that we provide as a nation, but as a marketer, like what can you tweak to get the phone to ring? There are simple changes sometimes that truly can have massive impact. And this is a dream example of how that happened. - Right. And you know, Grant had said, you know, my customer obsession is getting as many people as possible the help they need as fast as possible. And to have such a clear understanding of your purpose and your goal and your mission that really helps you narrow in on exactly what you need to do and what steps you need to take to make that happen, to make that outcome achievable. Because so many people I think go into certain things maybe with a big vision or goal and don't have enough clarity around the purpose and so they can't put a good plan in place to get there. - Yeah. So I guess the other question is, what other services out there need this level of immediacy? It's a fascinating success story. Because when life is on the line as humans, we tend to be able to rally and come up with solutions to save lives. - Mm-hmm. - In situations where it's very clear you're in a crisis, it's incredible to me how technology and people come together. And we actually see, have seen as a coastal and other examples like we're headquartered down in Florida and wherever there is a hurricane, we tend to get the call to come in and set up disaster relief centers using Salesforce and we're really, really good at it. But you know, it's fascinating when life is on the line how people and technology comes together and I hate to keep applying it to more mundane examples. But you know, it's kind of the attitude you have to take as a leader when you're really trying to impact your customers. You know, customers are on the line and we take them for granted sometimes. This is a case where vibrant is not taking the help secret for granted at all. It is doing everything it possibly can to create an environment that's gonna hopefully return this person to a better state of mind. - Exactly. And I mean, I know you say that you're tying it to more mundane examples and you know, while that is true, not every thing is going to be about saving lives. I also think it's important to learn from the best of us to figure out how to improve quality of life in all sorts of small ways. Because if we can improve those moments of connection and provide those moments of ease in people's lives, those types of interactions definitely do build up. And so the more we all can do, I think, even in the smallest moments to offer a level of concern and responsiveness and care who knows what effect that might have on a person's day, right? Are you gonna be the drop in the bucket that creates an overflow situation? Or are you gonna help, you know, scoop some of that out and bring them back to a more even keel? - We had Bob Ferneson, I don't know, a couple of years ago and one of the things I remember him saying was the bedside manner that your call center agents have when they're talking to customers is critical. And to create the best environment for your contact center agents are now in this AI world, your chat bots to be asking the right questions or saying the right things, you have to use modern technology. You gotta give them a chance. You can't put them in a swivel chair and make them toggle through spreadsheets to try to figure out who they're talking to and what their issue might be. Put them in a situation where they can actually take time to have empathy with a client and you'll be amazed at how your brand efficacy rises and you'll be amazed at how people start to spread the word about the experience they had. - Thanks for listening to our interview with Grant Revy. 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